Five Languages, One Film, and the Most Complicated Conversation in Cinema History
Imagine watching a scene where one character speaks Taiwanese. Another translates that into Cantonese. A third translates the Cantonese into Shanghaiese. Three living languages. Three political histories. One tense negotiation at a table where everyone has something to lose. That's a real scene in Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness, and it might be the most linguistically dense three minutes ever committed to film.
Five Languages, One Family's Island
The film follows the Lin family through Taiwan's transition from Japanese colonial rule to Kuomintang governance. Five languages get spoken across the runtime: Japanese, Taiwanese, Shanghaiese, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Each one marks where a character came from. Each one marks, quietly, who won and who lost.
The Lin family speaks Taiwanese with Japanese words woven in. Fifty years of Japanese occupation left its mark on vocabulary the way it leaves marks on everything: gradually, then completely. Third Brother Wen-leung switches between Shanghaiese and Taiwanese because he learned Shanghaiese during the war. His mouth carries his history. Big Brother's mistress and her brother Ah-ga speak Cantonese, having come from Guangdong province. The mainland gangsters speak Shanghaiese. Governor Chen Yi's radio broadcast comes through in Shanghaiese-accented Mandarin.
Nobody in this film speaks just one language by accident.
The Negotiation Scene Is a Linguistics Puzzle
Here's where it gets genuinely fascinating for anyone who loves how language works. At one point, a negotiation requires three hops: Taiwanese spoken, Cantonese translation by Ah-ga, then Shanghaiese translation by a gangster. Three communities. Three political allegiances, all trying to reach each other across the table.
Think about what gets lost, added, or softened at each step. Think about who holds the power in that chain. The Taiwanese speaker is on their home island. The Cantonese speaker is the bridge. The Shanghaiese speaker has... well. Language here isn't just communication. Language IS the game board.
If you've ever played a word game where the rules keep shifting, you understand something about what this scene captures.
Two Kinds of Japanese
The film opens with Hirohito's radio speech announcing Japan's surrender. The Japanese he speaks is a rarefied classical form, used only by the ruling class. This is a language being used as a wall.
On one side: the emperor, the colonial authority, the abstract power. On the other: everyone who had lived under Japanese rule for 50 years. Taiwan was ceded by the Qing Dynasty to Japan, then transferred to the Nationalist Party by the Allies. The island changed hands twice in living memory. Every character in this film carries those transfers in their mouth.
The film ends with Tachikawa's music. Whatever Tachikawa means to you right now, by the end, you'll know. Language works like that. So do word games.
Why Word Lovers Should Track This One Down
A City of Sadness was the first Taiwanese film to deal openly with the February 28 Incident, when the Kuomintang government's takeover turned violent. Bérénice Reynaud wrote a book about the film for British Film Institute Publishing in 2002. Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day gets mentioned in the same breath as another peak of Taiwanese cinema. Both are worth your time.
But this particular film's linguistic architecture is something else. It shows, rather than tells, what it means for a place to be colonized, reconquered, and renamed. Five languages. One family. The seams between them are where all the meaning lives.
That's exactly the kind of thing word lovers notice. You should watch it.
Source: Languagehat